So it’s a tablet, but also a laptop. Personally I see it as a laptop with a touch screen, I mean, its running Windows.

My first thought as I unboxed it is: Cool!
Maybe I just like new stuff but this is especially cool considering it’s my first experience with a touchscreen with Windows.
Unfortunately Windows 7 has terrible touch support. Period.

Gigabyte has clearly noticed Windows’ deficiency and has developed software to avoid too many problems, but in my opinion its just not nice to use, and I don’t think it will work until they move to the Metro interface (which I quite liked on Windows Phone 7), most likely in Windows 8.

Touchscreen problems aside, it is a remarkable little machine.

You can use it in a few ways:

First (in the first picture), you can use it as a regular laptop, but with a twist. Literally, a twist; the monitor can twist around from the central pivot (though not disconnect).

Second:

You can use it in what I call “Tablet” mode; You can swing the screen around on top of the keyboard and carry it around like that. So you loose the keyboard and touchpad, but you now have a full tablet.

Gigabyte T1125P-PRO in Tablet Mode

Finally, you can dock it. Yep that’s right, this baby comes with the coolest dock I’ve ever seen. ITS VERTICAL!

You close it up, chuck it in the dock and from there you can plug it into a keyboard, mouse, projector, LAN, audio etc etc, and it even comes with a DVD drive that also slots directly into the dock (and also has USB connection).

Gigabyte T1125P-PRO in Docked Mode

Overall, this is a really versatile machine, though I wish it had some sort of locking places for the screen so you can use it with the keyboard and screen on the same plane (it is possible, but not easy to use).

I’m actually thinking this would be a nice machine for Android, when x86 is supported that is (apparently it is actually possible (see this project). Just a thought 😀

Oh yeh, another cool feature of note: It comes preinstalled with both x86 Windows 7 and x64. But how does it work? Well what they’ve done is put 3 partitions: x64, x86, DATA. So to switch you just need to use their tool in Windows (it even comes in the form of a sidebar gadget) and it will change the boot order and reboot. Otherwise you can also boot into their recovery mode (from the BIOS) and select the one you want, though doing it this way will take you back to the original windows installation I believe.
Neat huh?

At any rate, is was extremely useful for my circumstance because I needed 32bit to use a projector driver (an older Toshiba that seems not to be updated too often).

UPDATE: Apparently there’s a pretty major problem with the touch screen; when you stop using the screen for 5 seconds it takes another few seconds for the screen to start responding again. I’m gonna see if there’s a driver that can fix this.

A Few Weeks Later:

As we have now had it for a few weeks, we have come across a couple of issues:
1) The screen, when in what I’ve dubbed ‘tablet mode’, is upside down, or rather, it is raised on the wrong side. And it does not come with a G-sensor to automatically rotate the screen. Now of course we can just use the rotate function of Windows, but unfortunately if its hooked up to a projector, which ours is frequently, the output will also be flipped upside down.
I’m guessing there’s an app out there to solve this one, so once things calm down at work ill check it out.

2) The other problem we’ve been having is the touch screen decides to go to go to sleep after a few seconds. Fortunately, this was easily remedied by going to the touch screen’s driver and disabling “Allow Windows to turn off this device to save power”. Still, not something I thought of initially considering I’m used to devices with native touch support (i.e. Android and iOS). Microsoft just don’t think about things like that.

That’s about it for the moment, hopefully its the last problem we have, because I really love this machine.

Now that the final version of Windows 8 is out, we did indeed give it a go! It was actually worse than Windows 7. The touchscreen constantly registered the wrong touch points, it was always getting hot, and the edge-swipe gestures Windows 8 requires are really hard to get (the screen doesn’t seem to register touches too close to the edges!